Paddington in Peru

Drone LiDAR and Aerial Survey for the Andes

Paddington in Peru sends the nation’s favourite bear home to the Andes… and a location shoot in the Peruvian highlands isn’t something you can fully cover with a ground crew and a tripod. We flew drone-based LiDAR and aerial photogrammetry across the mountain terrain to capture the landscape the VFX team would be building around.

Aerial survey gives you something stock footage and reference photography can’t: a measurable geometric model of the terrain, not just a nice-looking picture of it. That matters when a bear in a duffel coat needs to sit convincingly on a mountainside that was digitally extended well beyond what the unit actually filmed.

We delivered processed terrain models, point clouds and orthomosaics, coordinated with the production’s location photography so the captured geometry lined up with the plates the VFX team was compositing against… no guesswork reconciling two different versions of the same mountain.

Paddington’s world only works if it feels warm and real at the same time, and that’s a harder trick with sweeping Andean landscape than it is with a kitchen in Notting Hill. Getting the geometry right underneath it all is a quiet way of making sure nobody in the audience stops to question it.